


Une Semaine d'Amis

by iamtheladyfreak (dragonet)



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Friendship, Gen, I don't know, Minor Character Death, Modern AU, Not sure where I'm going with this, Paris - Freeform, bad grammar on purpose, if anywhere
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-26
Updated: 2014-09-28
Packaged: 2018-02-18 21:40:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2363045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonet/pseuds/iamtheladyfreak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>AN: So I don't really know what this is, it's so nondescript but it's also pretty and I love Enjolras's character... So I guess, let me know if you like it and I'll write some more.</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. Lundi

**Author's Note:**

> AN: So I don't really know what this is, it's so nondescript but it's also pretty and I love Enjolras's character... So I guess, let me know if you like it and I'll write some more.

 

Courfeyrac loves to drop flower petals in the Seine. He has a tenuous relationship with the river; some months he will not visit at all, others he will come twice a week.

There are always red roses to be found in Paris no matter the season. He brings them and counts the petals off in English _loves me loves me not_ until the bloom is gone and ten roses have vanished again into spots of blood borne away by the river. Then he gives one last look at the wide green water and pushes off the bridge rail, walking off in the direction of the Cimetière Père-Lachaise and home.

He lives in the bottom two floors of a house with bars on the windows. Sunlight hits the small courtyard garden in the morning and he sits there to see the new day red behind his eyelids while he drinks his tea. Beams lance also through the windows and turn the air to hot syrup, landing carelessly on unframed canvas prints (photographs: a laugh a bell a bird) stacked against the wall and fading them hour by hour, checking the tatty furniture and occasionally glancing over the other inhabitants of the house, but these two elusive creatures are rarely seen and rarer moved to speak.

To Courfeyrac’s delight cats frequent the patio, basking in the sun. He loves animals but the house prohibits pets. His favourite is a tortoiseshell queen in whose beautiful green eyes he imagines he can see his sister brought to Earth once more. She lolls under the overgrown shrub of uncertain variety and lords the other feline visitors, proclaiming by her supreme indifference that this is her queendom.

Generally during the day Courfeyrac is out at work. He is employed by two devout Creationists to watch the shop while they attend matters of great importance, although he is not expected to ask what these matters are. The shop is actually an exhibition of fossils, winding through the narrow corridors of an old house, each furnished with a plaque explaining in three languages why, in fact, they disprove the theory of evolution and support creationism. He is paid well because he must put up with angry tourists who think he is also a Creationist. He doesn’t mind because he has developed several amusing ways to deal with this behaviour.

Paris bustles in the way of all cities and he knows her as intimately as any lover. He possesses perennial curiousity never satisfied and spends his Sundays scouting the arrondissements and scrambling aroundthe Métro. He loves especially the little streets of Montmartre and the wide boulevards beside the Seine.

He wasn’t raised to this hurried life; until he was eighteen he lived in Essex, England, with his French parents. Their house was one of many in a scattered suburb delineated by rolling lawns and foundering exotic trees. He’d already been accepted to Paris-Sorbonne when his sister died and his first months in France were shadowed by the dark breath of that grief. But he assembled himself gracefully to this new life, so starkly brilliant and alive, took to it like a duckling in a pond.

He met Enjolras at the Malesherbes library one evening in December. Courfeyrac was already struggling with his French Language degree; the call of Parisian nights too alluring to ignore, the smiles of his new friends too beautiful to refuse. It would be a few more weeks before he dropped out of the course and found himself homeless but he wasn’t exactly concentrating; he stared dully across the room, listening to rain hammering on the roof and wishing he’d remembered his umbrella. The library smelt like damp clothes and clean carpets and old books.

_Are you using that trolley?_ someone asked behind him.

_No, no, take it,_ he said, tearing his eyes away from the far wall and gesturing acquiescence.

_Thanks,_ the guy said. _Actually, do you mind if I bring my stuff here? You’re right by a radiator._

_Go ahead,_ Courfeyrac said. He hadn’t ever seen a more beautiful man, not one like this all summer-bright and gold. Everything about him perfectly shaped from his hand starfished on his cheek as he read to his foot tapping _one-two-three-one-two-one-two-three_ under the desk.

They became friends accidentally. After two or three hours Enjolras rolled up his demographic charts and said,

_Coffee?_ without so much as looking at Courfeyrac who followed him out into the dark and the rain admiring the stubborn little march of his two-time steps. And after a cup of coffee Enjolras suddenly looked at him and asked who he was. Taken aback, he said _no one_ and something far behind those fierce eyes softened.

Courfeyrac loves Enjolras as he loves no one else. Partly with the jealousy of the struggling for the blithely unaware, partly for his optimism, partly for the tight grip of his fingers in the midnight of Paris when the river looks friendly and anything could happen.

When Courfeyrac left his course he also left student accommodation. The friends with beautiful smiles were too empty to ask for help and in any case he didn’t trust them. He stood on the street in every sweater he owned with drizzle crystallising in the dusk, three boxes of his belongings beside him. With no one to call, and nowhere to go, and only five hundred euros to his name, and for the first time in years he looked up at Paris’s red sky and wished.

His phone rang in his pocket.

Enjolras came and found him there in the doorway of a closed bakery and swept him up like an avenging angel all rain-wet and shining. His flat in le Marais was all of two rooms, as bright and intricate as Enjolras himself; the kitchen was painted yellow and silver and blue, his bedroom was a slice carved out by orange and green curtains, and everywhere there were cushions, cats, and books, hundreds of books.

_Are you okay with cats?_ Enjolras asked, putting Courfeyrac’s boxes by the door neatly. Courfeyrac laughed and knelt to greet the grey tabby at his feet. A ginger and a black and white cat watched carelessly from a nest of cushions in a chest of drawers.

_I love cats,_ he said wistfully. _But – my sister – she was allergic, so we only ever had dogs._

_That’s Philippe,_ Enjolras watched Courfeyrac scratch Philippe’s ears. _The black and white is Marseillaise and the ginger is Dead Louis. They’re okay, except when they decide to sit on my head while I sleep._

He stayed with Enjolras for two months and sometime in the first week when Courfeyrac had bolted awake once again on the sofa covered in sweat and panting, throws and pillows and Marseillaise tumbling away, Enjolras pushed the curtains aside and yawned and said, _stop that, come here._ Courfeyrac stared at him all tousled and sleep-warm and then he crawled into the box-bed with him and they slept like that every night, two sickle moons curled together with their faces to the midnight-blue wall. And the nightmares were banished by the all-effacing glow of Enjolras’s ribs rising under Courfeyrac’s palm.

He found the house quite by chance and a healthy dollop of luck. One clear day in December he was trudging home from work gloomily and happened to see a hand-written sign in the window behind rusty white bars.

_Housemate wanted! Must be non-smoker, clean, professional. Apply within._

So he didn’t think and knocked on the door.

The man who opened it was still laughing over his shoulder. His smile didn’t fade when he looked at Courfeyrac.

_Yes?_

_The sign… it says housemate wanted,_ Courfeyrac said.

_Oh, yeah. Are you –_ the guy checked the sign, _clean, professional, and a non-smoker?_

Courfeyrac thought about it.

_Two out of three?_ He volunteered doubtfully. _I’m not sure about professional._

_Well, do you have a job?_

_Yes,_ Courfeyrac said.

_Then you’re a professional. Cool, when can you move in?_

Enjolras helped him move in and when he was gone and Courfeyrac sat alone on the thin mattress in a bare room, he opened the boxes and found an orange and green blanket and wrapped himself up in it and that’s how he still sleeps, surrounded by the fading smell of Enjolras.

 


	2. Mardi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: another chapter of mediocrity and bad grammar. Sorry.

 

Enjolras loves watching Courfeyrac. The younger man visits after work and sprawls on Enjolras’s sofa, complaining about tourists and Marxists (Enjolras always guiltily glances towards the bottom shelf of the bookcase, where his Marxist books live – Courfeyrac knew him during that phase and has never let him forget it) until he suddenly sighs and slumps back onto the couch. Then it’s Enjolras’s job to smile, turn on a documentary, and let Courfeyrac snuggle into his side.

If they’re watching something particularly engrossing Courfeyrac’s thumb will find its way into his mouth within a matter of minutes. Enjolras sneaks peeks downwards, grinning silently because his friend is – there’s no other word. He’s cute.

From his skyward vantage point Enjolras can see Courfeyrac’s nut-brown eyelashes against his wan cheeks and his forefinger gently and rhythmically stroking his nose. He watches the lives of lions and behind the scenes in Chinese factories with the same diligence and rapt attention. Then as the evening wears on his head nods and he falls asleep against Enjolras’s thigh, his spit-shiny thumb falling out of his mouth. Enjolras contemplates the quick flitter of his sleeping eyes for a minute and then he gathers his friend up and bears him off to bed.

Enjolras has never had many friends. He was pushed out at school and never quite learnt the right social skills; Margot, his mother, left him to his own devices; which mostly included books and sewing and rescuing a succession of animals vetoed by the commissionaire, to Enjolras’s youthful fury. Their apartment was near the Champs-Élysées in the beating heart of Paris and populated almost exclusively by bare furnishings from a certain Swedish interior design house. Margot doesn’t spend much time there now and Enjolras imagines dust settling on every blond surface with savage delight.

Enjolras’s mother has always been a distant figure in his life. She’s the CEO of an international plastic recycling corporation (‘cercle-écologique’) and spends months at a time away from home. Much more present during childhood was his father substitute, Margot’s best friend. Pepe runs a salon in Faubourg Saint-Germain and gleefully refers to himself as neo-bourgeois. He comes to Enjolras’s flat for dinner sometimes and they spend the evening verbally sparring over hot barbeque ribs and red wine. Pepe criticises the cushions and Enjolras’s haircut and Enjolras calls him _putain apologiste_ and flips him off.

So Enjolras adores Courfeyrac for his friendship, with the passion of youth and the deep calm of his soul. He is happy he’s allowed to love Courfeyrac. It feels simple, right and good. He curls himself around his friend and yawns into brown curls.

 _I love you,_ he murmurs and is asleep before Courfeyrac’s drowsy reply.

 _Love you too_.

In fact, the only friend Enjolras has other than Courfeyrac is a man called Combeferre, a Moroccan-Jamaican medical student at Paris V. He’s actually more like an acquaintance and Enjolras met him quite by chance a few years ago.

There was a march protesting police brutality and of course Enjolras was there. Paris sweltered under midsummer sun, the humidity was endless, blue sky arched infinitely overhead. In the less savoury arrondissements, people lived without air-con and glittering eyes watched everything, restless and irritated. It was the deep breath and they all knew it, everyone Enjolras was involved with, all the people in club basements and garret rooms arguing fervently and living on bread and cheap wine and bitter cigarettes.

It was supposed to be peaceful. Everyone remembered that too late when the shields and the riot armour came out, when stones started flying and truncheons were employed.

A girl was caught in the press and started crying. She couldn’t breathe. He could see her red hair between the bodies and he was terrified she’d fall and be trampled. He was younger then (helpless and frustrated and angry, so angry). He elbowed people aside until he was in the centre of the crush and she looked up at him and he’d never seen such fear.

 _It’s okay,_ he said. People moved for them when she started screaming and he half-carried her into a shop doorway where she crumpled, a marionette without a puppeteer.

 _Is she alright?_ someone stumbled down next to him, bent and took her pulse. _People always overestimate how much stress they can take… are_ you _alright?_

He turned to Enjolras who saw – a galaxy of a thousand freckles and liquid black eyes, dreadlocks tied back away from ears glittering with silver rings.

 _Okay, take it easy,_ the guy said. _A deep breath, come on_.

Enjolras breathed. It felt like he started breathing that day. As though he’d been waiting for that calm command to start his lungs working properly.

 _Where are we going?_ Courfeyrac asks. He has to hurry to keep up with Enjolras’s longer strides. It’s winter, the wind whips off the Seine to freeze fingertips and noses. Enjolras stops and wraps his scarf around the younger man’s neck. Courfeyrac gets sick too often.

 _I want you to meet someone,_ Enjolras says, starting out again. Courfeyrac stares across the grey river. Enjolras comes back and takes his hand. They walk on.

 _What kind of someone?_ Courfeyrac asks on the Métro.

 _A friend,_ Enjolras replies.

_Just a friend?_

_Just a friend, Courf. Don’t you think I’d have told you if I was seeing someone?_

Courfeyrac watches the bowels of the city speed past and doesn’t reply.

They disembark at Ménilmontant. 20e isn’t the nicest arrondissement and Courfeyrac feels a little uneasy as Enjolras leads him away from the busy shops into residential streets.

They turn into the shadow of a towering fifteen-storey block. Narrow sliding windows glare at them as Enjolras pushes the intercom for an apartment on the thirteenth floor.

_Hello?_

_It’s me._

_Hey! I’ll buzz you in, come on up. Coffee?_

The elevator is broken. Courfeyrac takes Enjolras’s scarf off as they climb.

 _How do people do this with shopping?_ he wonders breathlessly.Enjolras laughs, equally winded, clutches the handrail and giggles until he coughs.

They come out onto a narrow balcony lined with front doors.  Clear cold wind slices them and Paris spreads out in front of them like a heavy-eyed lover. Enjolras knocks at Apartment 13-28.

A man throws the door open. Courfeyrac stares at – flowers in his right hand, daisies and geraniums, brown skin spattered with a thousand freckles and bright wide eyes.

_This is Combeferre._

Combeferre sees: a boy still, bitten nails and grief crusted under his skin, memories so far off behind his face he might be floating.

Much later when they’re gone and he’s drinking his last cup of coffee before the night shift, he can still taste the name on his tongue like grapefruit, powerful and bitter. He whispers it into the red Parisian night as he navigates the chilly streets.

_Courfeyrac._

 


End file.
